Quebec’s deputy agriculture minister insists the 2007 review of provincial farm policy is not intended to be a cost-saving exercise in dismantling a program that farmers support.
Quebeckers would not want that.
“I think most citizens see agriculture as something that is important in Quebec society, that contributes to their society,” Michel Saint-Pierre said.
“They want to see farmers happy and prosperous. But this is an open ended review with public hearings and I understand that farmers are nervous. There are critics.”
Indeed there are, although most of them appearing at public hearings this winter and spring likely will not be farmers. The legislated single farm voice l’Union des Producteurs Agricoles has been remarkably successful at fending off court challenges to its power and in signing up farmers.
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While all farmers in the province must pay $270 in dues to the UPA, just like workers in other industrial unions, they need not sign membership cards. UPA leaders say 94 percent have signed cards voluntarily.
Instead, most of the criticism of the Quebec model likely will come from economists and academics who see the collectivist, marketing board, single voice model as being out of step with a globalized, trade deal and market driven world.
“Farmers like the Quebec model now because of the dollars that flow through it,” Université de Laval economist Jean-Philippe Gervais said. “But I really don’t think it is sustainable. At some point, government will have to address some tough questions about cost, about regulations and about how the Quebec model fits into globalization.”
The conservative Montreal Economic Institute, often described as a Quebec version of the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, has been a persistent critic of Quebec’s reliance on supply management.
And Laval agricultural economics professor Guy Debailleul has argued that the farmer trade-off of strong government support in return for the most regulated farm sector in Canada may be reaching a tipping point.
“Indicators could lead us to question the real health of the Quebec model and whether it supports sustainable agriculture,” he told a 2005 meeting of the Agricultural Institute of Canada. “I think there are some problems.”
At the MacDonald campus of McGill University in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue west of Montreal, Paul Thomassin, an agricultural economist who studies Quebec farm policy says the growing Quebec demand for environmental stewardship and regulation is a price farmers pay for their security.
“When the environment imposed itself as an issue, farmers picked up on it, but it does add a layer to the farm policy and I think that is a real restriction,” said Thomassin.
University of Lethbridge agricultural economist Danny Le Roy is spending the year at Laval doing research and he has formed a strong view of Quebec farm policy compared to the Alberta model he knows.
“My sense is that the prosperity policy here really means a lot of government and that can be counterproductive,” he said. “Farmers elsewhere in Canada may look with envy at what Quebec farmers have, but they don’t know about the price, regulations and the limitation of choice.”
It is an argument that makes Quebec cow-calf producer Gib Drury chuckle.
“I have as much freedom as the producer in Alberta,” he said. “I just get better prices.”
